Published: December 31, 1981

SEVERAL months before he was shot to death, Mohandas K. Gandhi asked, ''Is it the kindness of God or His irony that the flames do not consume me?'' It is a wonder that Danilo Dolci, who is often called Sicily's Gandhi, has not been shot. Almost everybody else who tried to help Sicilian workers and peasants out of poverty and brutishness has been shot, usually by the Mafia, while the church nods and the police wink. Why not Mr. Dolci, a troublemaker of the first order and not even a Sicilian to begin with?

He was an architecture student on the mainland. Experiencing a discrepancy between Bach in the concert hall and misery on the street, he joined a Christian commune in Tuscany; instead of taking a degree, he took care of war orphans and cleaned latrines. In 1952 he went to Trappeto, a fishing village in western Sicily. He has been there ever since, teaching school, organizing peasant and artisan cooperatives, agitating for bridges and dams and leading sit-ins and fasts and ''strikes-in-reverse.'' (A strike-in-reverse occurs when the unemployed, to dramatize their joblessness, begin public works without state authorization.) Studs Terkel of Sicily

Mr. Dolci also listens, which is why he is called the Oscar Lewis and Studs Terkel of Sicily. For 30 years, he has written down what he hears and read it back to the teller. A story - a connection - is made; lives are rescued from silence. This isn't casual anthropology; it is documentation for what he rather unfortunately characterizes as ''our growth process of conscientizing.'' Before they can learn to trust one another, members of the Sicilian underclass must learn to credit their own experience. Before Mr. Dolci or anyone else can teach the children, the parents must agree on what is to be taught and how. Before there can be a trade union or a wine-producing collective, history must be recovered and the name of the enemy articulated. ''Sicilian Lives'' consists of several dozen, among thousands, of such articulations.

The Marxist art critic and novelist John Berger bullies us in his foreword. Because we are likely to be Westerners steeped in the sin of abstract thinking, we are told in advance that we won't understand what the Sicilians are saying, the tragedy of their oppression, their lust for revenge. Many Sicilians themselves apparently fail to grasp the dialectical imperative implicit in their recollections; only Mr. Berger knows for sure. Mr. Berger once wrote a novel, ''Pig Earth,'' along these abstract lines; it was as tedious as this foreword.

Mr. Dolci bullies, too. He will not permit us to enjoy his stories. They are ''much too expressive, too perfect, to allow for estheticizing.'' I find these strictures pointlessly severe. We listen and read for many reasons, and hear many things at once - wretchedness, dazzling intuition, cowardice, love, superstition, beauty, greed, transcendence and waste. Above all, waste. We can even figure out how Mr. Dolci must have prompted the speaker and shaped the speech, helping perfection along. Neither he nor Mr. Berger, however, owns Rosaria's story or Grandma Medda's or Uncle Felice's.

Listen, then, to fishermen, shepherds, priests, street cleaners, fixers of soccer games, wardens, healers, masons, ragpickers, aristocrats, cardsharps, politicians, pickpockets, tenant farmers, barbers, fascists and robbers of tombs. Play canasta or Ziganet. Hunt snails, skin frogs and collect lead left over from target practice by the police. Desert the army, talk to goats, find yourself dead and dumped in a ditch because you thought they were serious about land reform. Fish for eels with a kitchen fork.

According to Vincenzo: ''If there's no work you eat grass. You do anything if you're starving. You can't see anymore through your eyes.'' Vincenzo also tells us, ''Once somebody threw a handful of confetti at me and I bit off his finger.'' According to Bastiano: ''The kids look like little old men. Weather-beaten, downtrodden, hunched over from all the work. You can't tell if they're old men, kids or dwarfs.'' According to Grandma Medda: ''If your man's sick you say, 'Save my husband. Take one of my children.' '' And if he is really sick, you pray, ''Madonna, I lick your floor.'' Which is exactly, Mr. Dolci suggests, what a woman must do - go to the church and lick the floor. Talking With Hands

Sariddu goes into the army and can't talk to his lieutenant because he must stand at attention: ''I just had to use my hands. You can't communicate without them. How can you stand there like a poker and talk to people? Your mouth means nothing without your hands.'' A friend of Placido contemplates the murder of a leader and the silence of those who followed him: ''Whoever serves the people, feeds pigs.'' A priest explains that the church teaches ''that damage to property is a mortal sin.'' A criminal thinks aloud about the stars: ''There must be smoke with all that fire.'' And ''at daybreak, they disappear. Like cows they go into their barn.''

And so on, unto heartbreak, on an island the size of Switzerland populated by a million more people than live today in Norway. Only the grave robbers know anything of Sicily's ancient history; only Mr. Dolci seems unbroken, nonviolent, among the children, listening, an architect of muscle and tongue. We ought to be grateful. What is it that he knows? He knows, I think, a great and simple truth put into words by the French economist and mathematician Antoine Augustin Cournot:

''The fact that we repeatedly fail in some venture merely because of chance is perhaps the best proof that chance is not the cause of our failure.''